Hi everyone, hoping someone can give me some tips/opinions on what to do here. We finally just finished recording DI's for one of our songs and am getting ready to send them out for re-amping. The song was recorded in a few different sessions over the course of a couple weeks. New strings were used every time and preamp settings were untouched. Pickups were an EMG-85. While editing and trying to get a decent tone with an amp sim I started to notice an issue. The levels across the song are very inconsistant. I'm not talking about dynamics, I mean he played overall really soft in one part, and slammed it home in another. I asked the guitarist what the hell was going on and got: "ohh yea, I played those parts really light so it was clearer". Well, then why the hell didn't you play the other parts soft so they were clearer? "Uhh, I don't know" Looking back I do remember him constantly asking me, "turn the gain up, ohh, turn it down, ohh turn it up, ohh turn it down" to compensate. He's on my shit list at the moment.
I'll give you some more specific examples:
In the verse the guitar is peaking at say, -9, while in the bridge/chorus, it's around -3db. There's a palm muted breakdown, peaking around -3db, and in another section where it's basically the same thing (palm muted chugs), it's peaking around -8, -9db.
In a nutshell, the result is this:
If I get the pre/post gains dialed in real nice so that the verse is sounding great, then when it gets to the bridge and the input volumes shoot up + 6-7db, it all goes to hell and the tone sounds like balls and loses all clarity. And vice a versa.
So what should I do here? It's basically like he turned hit volume knob up and down throughout the whole song. Should I normalize each section to -3db? This would keep the dymanics in each section intact, but give me a consistant rms value across the song, hence keeping the tone consistant. Has anyone else ran into issues like this?
I'll give you some more specific examples:
In the verse the guitar is peaking at say, -9, while in the bridge/chorus, it's around -3db. There's a palm muted breakdown, peaking around -3db, and in another section where it's basically the same thing (palm muted chugs), it's peaking around -8, -9db.
In a nutshell, the result is this:
If I get the pre/post gains dialed in real nice so that the verse is sounding great, then when it gets to the bridge and the input volumes shoot up + 6-7db, it all goes to hell and the tone sounds like balls and loses all clarity. And vice a versa.
So what should I do here? It's basically like he turned hit volume knob up and down throughout the whole song. Should I normalize each section to -3db? This would keep the dymanics in each section intact, but give me a consistant rms value across the song, hence keeping the tone consistant. Has anyone else ran into issues like this?
) - beyond that, I wouldn't by any means say normalizing "just leads to problems" if you do the trial and error method of applying it with conservative settings, undoing, and gradually working your way up until it's right where you want it!
